During World War I, while a young German officer lay in a hospital
recuperating from his wounds, he passed the time looking at maps and
pondering the remarkable way in which the opposing sides of the
Atlantic seemed to fit together. Alfred Wegener was not the first to
notice that the bulging coastline of Brazil is a reciprocal of the west
coast of Africa. For centuries scientists and cartographers speculated
that a single large continent, which came to be called Pangea, had
broken up into huge fragments...